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Bank of Thailand Plans to Create Central Bank Digital Currency

Posted on 2018-08-22

Bank of Thailand have announced Digital Currency Project using R3 Corda platform

On August 21, 2018, Bank of Thailand (BoT) reported about intention to create a wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) on the basis of R3’s Corda platform. The “wholesale” version of CBDC allows using it by financial institutions and markets only, in contrast with a “retail CBDC” for the general public.

According to the press release, the BoT concluded an agreement with eight financial institutions within the framework of the CBDC project including Krung Thai, Bangkok Bank Public, Standard Chartered Bank, Siam Commercial Bank and HSBC. These banks will discuss, design and develop the proof-of-concept wholesale CBDC prototype together, and the first stage of the project should be finished at the beginning of 2019.

R3’s Corda, for its part, is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform that has been designed to work within the financial service sector and uses a permissioned system to restrict data access to the required participants only.

The project plans to explore potential benefits of DLT and in this way “enhance efficiency of the Thai financial market infrastructure”.

CBDCs attract attention of the banking sector all around the world. Anthony Lewis – R3’s research director – have predicted that efforts to develop wholesale CBDCs would gain in strength in 2018 because an increasing number of institutions see the potential benefits that could be gained through their issuance.